All that matters is what Bush said:

"Plan B is to make Plan A work."

And there you have it. None of this other stuff matters. Whether you say "surge" or "escalation." Whether we can really judge anything when "only" 60% of the "surge" is in place. Whether all the "surge" troops will be in place by June. And then how many more months it will take to judge whether or not the full "surge" is working. And/or whether or not Maliki will move through any of the political changes Bush claims he's asked of him.

The generals are now saying that it will be the end of the year before they'll even be able to tell anything. At least.

The end of the year. That would be roughly eight months. At least.

But just as it was back in 2002, when Bush actually stared into numerous television cameras many, many times and SWORE that he "had not yet made a decision to go to war against Iraq,"--it was of course all a lie. He had made that decision before 9-11.

They all had.

And so now, they will do anything--ANYTHING--to make it look as though there is even a small measure of "success" in Baghdad, and they are defining down what that measure is. Now it's "stability and security" in Baghdad.

To that end, they'll build all these little zoos throughout the city to corral neighborhoods from one another with high concrete walls and slow-death checkpoints, shutting the traffic down to a dribble and a trickle.

They'll shut down the whole city, in fact, fill it full of troops on every corner.

Al-Sadr's militia are lying low. The insurgents have fled to the outer provinces. Marshal Law is in place.

Consequently, any slowdown in the horrific violence--no matter how transitory or illusury--will be shouted from the rooftops:

SUCCESS! SUCCESS! SEE? WE DID THE RIGHT THING AND ALL YOU DEMOCRAT WUSSES WHO SAID WE COULDN'T DO IT ARE BAR-B-QUE IN '08 HEE HEE HA HA HO HO!

Truth, of course, will be irrelevant.

But then, it always has been. Big lies, little lies, what's the difference?

The savage casualty spikes in areas like the Diyala province, where nine brave soldiers lost their lives and 20 more were terribly wounded in a sophisticated and coordinated suicide-bomb attack--will be irrelevant because PLAN A WAS TO SECURE BAGHDAD.

PLAN B WAS TO MAKE PLAN A WORK. Period.

The fact that Baghdad cannot exist indefinitely in such a surreal state will also be irrelevant as long as it looks good during the election season.

If the people in Baghdad actually get fooled into thinking they might have peace, only to cruelly lose all of it as soon as the Americans leave, well, that's irrelevant too.

If the rest of the country goes up in flames, and we keep feeding more and more American bodies into the fire, which means more will have to be sent to Baghdad to take their place as "reinforcements" (what a grand-sounding military word that is, eh?)--stretching out the "surge" into years and not months, it is irrelevant as long as Baghdad can present a photo-op tableau of security and stability in time for political campaigns.

And then, when the military has been pretty much broken beyond repair and we have absolutely no choice but to pull out, the whole house of cards will collapse ANYWAY.

But the elections will be over by then so it won't really matter.

If the Democrats win the White House, they can be blamed. If the Republicans win...well, so what? They're back in the White House!

And this is the diabolical beauty of Plan A.

You know, when my son was deployed to Iraq, he felt really bad for the Iraqi people. Other military moms have told me their sons and daughters felt the same way.

The bad guys use innocents; they use their homes and hide behind them. You have to get the bad guys, and maybe a home gets destroyed, for the most part, and you feel bad. You see the suffering and the grieving that war leaves in its wake, and you hurt for those who hurt, but what can you do? If you don't get the bad guys today, they'll blow you up tomorrow.

I guess what I'm saying is that, when the Republicans say that Democrats want the war to be lost so they will be right, they don't know how badly that hurts the troops.

Nobody wants the war to be lost.

The young men in my family have been deeply, profoundly altered by what happened to them in that cauldron (and what is happening now, still got one there); they would love nothing more than to feel as if they did, indeed provide some measure of "security and stability" to the country and its people.

After my son's unit fought in the Battle of Fallujah in '04, thousands of people in the city voted, then, the following January of '05, and my son and his buddies helped make that possible. It meant the world to them.

Then they went back in January of '06 and things were almost as bad in the city as they'd been in November of '04. They were devastated, frustrated, embittered.

And that's when most of them figured out that the whole war was a lie.

What I'm saying is that, if this ridiculous plan to secure Baghdad was REAL, if it was something that truly would lead to lasting success, then I, for one, would lie low and keep my mouth shut long enough to see if it really could work. My son and my nephews and all our men and women would deserve that much.

I believe General Petraeus is a good man, and I believe he is working his heart out to make this work because he is a good soldier, but he himself wrote the manual on counter-insurgency tactics, and he knows that this is too little, too late to make any kind of lasting dent on the violence in Iraq.

My brother-in-law served 30 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces and retired with a star. He told me that it would take two full generations to win over the Iraqi people through counter-insurgency tactics now, because, "We've lost this generation. They hate us now. We'll have to stay there at least 20 more years to make any real changes."

Already, Petraeus is having to send thousands more to Diyala and then replace the thousands he sent from Baghdad.

The Air Force alone has had to cough up 20,000 airmen to do combat and support tasks for the overstretched Army--tasks for which they are not trained. (I know because, believe it or not, my sister was in the Air Force, so yeah, that's pretty much all of us.)

It's a Petraeus "go deep" Hail Mary pass to Maliki, as if he actually has any real power in his shaky, divided government. As if he really could unite the Sunnis and Shiites now, as the neocons swear they expect him to do.

This whole thing, this "surge"--it's too little, and it's too late, and too, too many Americans are going to die. The real tragedy--aside from what is happening to the Iraqis--is that most of our men and women, over there for their second, third, or fourth deployments, know that.

They KNOW it.

All they want to do is just survive long enough to get home.

The mouthpiece-generals can say anything they want about whether or not the troop escalation (WHEN will they stop using the photo-op phrase "surge"?) is working or whether it will have to be "extended" or whether more troops will be needed...They can talk from now until doomsday.

But for the guys actually doing the FIGHTING, well, they don't have much time to discuss it.

Surviving is the only Plan B they've got.

(cross-posted at http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/deanie_mills)